Ignasi aballi biography sampler

In general, an artist’s collection consists of works by others together with the artist’s own works. The works by others come from two different sources: firstly, the most active one, consists of items purchased by the artist; the second, rather more passive, consists of works by other artists received either by exchange or by generous donation. The collection of Antoni Tàpies is no exception. Begun in the mid-1940s in parallel to his own artistic development, it was not until the 1960s, coinciding with the consolidation of his career, that the collection really took off.

Tàpies had in mind two references: firstly, the model of the artist-collector offered by Picasso and Miró, whose studios he had visited in his youth – Picasso with a remarkable collection of African and modern art, Miró with a collection of objects from popular culture and nature – and, secondly, the special Christmas 1934 issue of the magazine D’Ací i d’Allà, dedicated to the art of the twentieth century, and some numbers of Cahiers d’art, especially the 1936 issue devoted to the object, which contributed to his discovery of modern art and the relationships that it established with other manifestations, both artistic and popular. Tàpies wrote:

‘The D’Ací i d’Allà issue has been with me all my life and I still have it at home, now signed by its authors. The emotion brought about by Picasso’s Woman in a Shirt; the Braque still life; the Futurist paintings by Severini; the fabulous still life by Juan Gris, which disconcerted me with the ambiguity of its meticulous realism that at once wasn’t realistic; the geometries of Kandinsky and Mondrian; the magic of Max Ernst; the great glass of Duchamp; Miró’s Man with Pipe, which reminded me of prehistoric cave paintings; and the bursting yellows and reds of his stencil; it was all a shock that seemed to bring light to the inner landscapes of my imagination.’

Tàpies built a heterogeneous collection, which includes works of Western art and art fr

The final part of the ‘Généalogies fictives [Fictional Genealogies]’ cycle, Record of the Invisible / Chroniques de l’invisible, is an exhibition playing upon the relationships between visibility and invisibility, proximity and distance, ‘here’ and ‘elsewhere’. The project began with a proposal to five artists to imagine artistic interventions for public or private spaces in and around Saint-Nazaire, outside of Le Grand Café. These deliberately unpublicised gestures were left ‘outside’ and the exhibition at Le Grand Café retains just their traces or their deformed echoes. Together they make up an autonomous exhibition that is formally and sensually independent from the original protocol. The project works with the town’s history and geography, like the two precedent stages in the cycle, but this time in a ghostly register of rumour, the clandestine and the figuration of an elsewhere. At the heart of this project is the poetic or symbolic translation of an absence, allowing the visitor’s sensibility, imagination and beliefs to take over in understanding the message or apprehending the artwork that they are presented with.

This experiment is drawing upon several sources. The first is a critical reflection on art in the public space, which is too often considered as a simple extension of the museum, in other words a space that has to be conquered or annexed when the imposing artwork is triumphantly placed. We, on the other hand, are emphasising the opposite: unassigned, sometimes invisible gestures that don’t always leave a trace and remain minor and non-dominant towards the context in which they appear. Works to be seen at some point but not for sure, to be encountered by chance, works for animals or the elements as much as for conscious or unconscious witnesses. Art for the wind, the sea, the sun or the birds. These necessarily modest interventions now measure art’s capacity to resist and survive, but also to make the world freely poetic without

As a starting point for Translations, Ignasi Aballí’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, we could take his video Repaint Miró (right-hand room) which, projected onto two screens, shows a restorer who is covering completely in white a bronze sculpture by Joan Miró before repainting it in its original colours. This act of total erasure (white sculpture against a white background) before restoring the impact of a work by another artist is both absurd and an apt description of Aballí’s modus operandi. In part comic, part serious guise, he challenges seeing and appearances. In this video, he invokes art history (Miró, of course, as well as Rauschenberg with his famous Erased De Kooning), emphasising its fragility, its codes and its certainties. His video, which could be seen as iconoclastic, opens the way for multiple interpretations.

The series Translation of a Japanese dictionary of colour combination, which accentuates the title of the exhibition, consists of collages that reconstitute as faithfully as possible the colour combinations organised by Japanese artist and designer Sanzo Wada (1883-1967) Aballí works like a painter with his palette, choosing his colours meticulously among the thousands of monochrome samples cut out over more than 15 years from daily newspapers. By grouping together, calibrating and filing these abstract press cuttings (abstract because they are not figurative but abstract also because they refer to an image of reality which is now unknown to us), Aballí recreates combinations that invite us to compose coloured proposals of reality.

2002

Solo shows:

Maior Gallery, Pollensa, Majorca.

Bufill, Juan: “Una pintura ya del siglo XXI”, La Vanguardia, Barcelona, February 10th.

Puig, Arnau: “El abandono de lo simbólico frente a lo digital”, ABC, Barcelona, February 2nd.

The group exhibitions of this year are:

“Big Sur, Arte Nuevo Español”, Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin.

Exhibition of sixteen contemporary creators, curated by Enrique Juncosa (Abad, Ballester, Soto, Alez, etc.)

Juncosa, Enrique: “Big Sur, Arte Nuevo Español”, exhibition catalogue text “Big Sur”, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2002.

“Arte en España, 1977-2002”. Manege Exhibition Hall, Moscow.

!A selection of The Patio Herreriano Contemporary Art collection.

Marchán Fiz, Simón: “Arte en
España en el último cuarto de siglo”. Exhibition text catalogue for Arte in España, 1977-2002.

Museo Patio Herreriano de Valladolid

Opening of the new Museum.

Artium, Centro Museo de Arte
Contemporáneo, Vitoria

Opening of the new Museum.

“Plural el arte español ante el siglo XXI”, Palacio del Senado, Madrid.

Alonso Molina, Oscar: Text
individualized by the artist in the
catalogue.

“Abstracciones 1955-2002”. Fundación T